Got back late last night from Denver. I made the trip (720
miles) in under 12 hours. Love CO's 75mph limit.
The speaker lineup at the conference was great. I wanted to
be several places at once. Maddog's keynote was great.
"Linux around the world," gave his historical perspective
of how Linux has spread. His recurring theme was the many
managers he ran into saying, "Oh no, there's no Linux
here," and then him either proving them wrong or changing
the situation. At one point he considered himself the
"Johnny Appleseed of Linux." Great talk.
Also of great interest was a panel discussion, by several
speakers, put together at the last minute to fill in for a
speaker who had to cancel due to illness. Discussed was
"Why Linux?" Of particular interest was the question "why
Linux instead of one of the BSD's?"
It sort of boiled down to the community and Linus Torvalds.
Rasmus Lerdorf gave a particularly inspiring talk on
the history of the development of the PHP scripting
language. Surprising to me, was that this
guy had NO formal computer science training. He developed
PHP in the beginning to satisfy his need to do some things
with his on-line resume.
Other very interesting talks I attended were one on embedded
systems by Jim Ready and one on use of Linux in K-12
educational institutions by Harry McGregor and Justin
Zeigler.
I also got to hand out a couple of resumes and finally meet
the folks from LWN. All in
all, a worthwhile trip.
Also of note today, I almost got fooled by kuro5hin's
latest post.
And digging thru past articles where additional postings
have occurred, I found this nugget
about Apache's open-source develoment model, posted by mbp. (Sorry
about the motorbike - poor kangaroo ;-)